CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
New York Philharmonic

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

New York Philharmonic
Lorin Maazel, Music Director and Conductor
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Piano

BARBER Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5
GERSHWIN Piano Concerto in F
STRAVINSKY Le sacre du printemps

Sponsored by Toshiba Corporation

Program Notes:

SAMUEL BARBER (1910–1981)
Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5

Samuel Barber was fortunate to be born into a family that was attuned to recognize his musical gifts. Although his parents were not professional musicians, his aunt, the contralto Louise Homer, was a mainstay at the Metropolitan Opera, and her husband, Sidney Homer, was well known as a composer of what some might dismiss as parlor songs.

At The Curtis Institute of Music, Barber studied principally piano (with Isabelle Vengerova), composition (with Rosario Scalero), and voice (with the baritone Emilio de Gorgorza, who was a colleague of Barber’s aunt’s at the Met). He was 21 years old and still a student when he began his Overture to The School for Scandal. Although musical training was clearly at the center of Curtis’s curriculum, students also were expected to take courses in other fields. Barber concentrated on languages and literature for his electives. His love for literature would continue through his life, and he would attach literary allusions to many of his symphonic pieces, even those that were not in any sense programmatic. This habit began with his very first orchestral composition, the Overture to The School for Scandal; Barber insisted that, though his piece was not intended as incidental music for a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play, it was nonetheless conceived “as a musical reflection of the play’s spirit.”

Anyone familiar with Sheridan’s 1777 comedy of manners will readily concur that it has a distinctive spirit, and a most agreeable one. Let us dip at random into its irresistible pages:

Rowley: Oh! Sir Peter, your servant: how is it with you, sir?
Sir Peter Teazle: Very bad, Master Rowley, very bad. I meet with nothing but crosses and vexations.
Rowley: What can have happened since yesterday?
Sir Peter: A good question to a married man!
Rowley: Nay, I’m sure, Sir Peter, your lady can’t be the cause of your uneasiness.
Sir Peter: Why, has any body told you she was dead?
Rowley: Come, come, Sir Peter, you love her, notwithstanding your tempers don’t exactly agree.
Sir Peter: But the fault is entirely hers, Master Rowley. I am, myself, the sweetest-tempered man alive, and hate a teasing temper; and so I tell her a hundred times a day.
Rowley: Indeed!
Sir Peter: Ay; and what is very extraordinary, in all our disputes she is always in the wrong!

Barber commenced work on his Overture during the summer of 1931, which he was spending in Cadegliano, Italy, with his fellow Curtis student and romantic partner Gian Carlo Menotti. Every other week the two traveled to another town for composition lessons with Scalero, under whose watchful eye this piece was essentially completed by the time Barber returned to classes at Curtis that fall. The conservatory’s orchestra director, Fritz Reiner, couldn’t summon up any interest in it, so Barber’s Overture went unperformed until August 1933, when it was premiered by The Philadelphia Orchestra in an outdoor summer concert. Four months earlier the piece had won Barber a $1,200 composition prize that enabled him to return in Italy for another summer; an unfortunate result was that he therefore missed the work’s premiere. By the 1950s the piece became a staple of the orchestral repertoire, although not before undergoing a fair amount of criticism for not sounding very American.

Doubtless its language adheres more tightly to the European mainstream of its time than, say, to the wide-open-spaces sounds of Aaron Copland or Roy Harris. Still, it is odd, as Barber’s biographer Barbara B. Heyman pointed out, that “the musical climate was such at this time that if a young American composer had achieved as much recognition as Barber—he had by then won two Pulitzer traveling fellowships and a Prix de Rome—but was not part of the mainstream’s quest for a national identity, he was considered an anomaly and thus not representative of ‘American’ music.” Today we may hear this Overture as more “American” than its first audiences did. Still, in the end, it earns its keep thanks to its universality, its skillful reflection of the spirit of intrigue and quicksilver banter that has kept Sheridan’s play afloat for 225 years.


GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898–1937)
Concerto in F Major for Piano and Orchestra

On the afternoon of February 12, 1924, musical New York gathered at the city’s Aeolian Hall to witness a concert the bandleader Paul Whiteman was presenting under the intriguing rubric “An Experiment in Modern Music.” Whiteman believed that the future of American concert music would involve a fusion of European symphonic traditions with the uniquely American style known as jazz. While most of the program he presented that day was far from what could honestly be described as “experimental” in 1924, it did include the premiere of one work that perfectly exemplified his vision: George Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue for Piano and Orchestra.

Among the musicians in the audience was the conductor Walter Damrosch, who had inherited the directorship of the New York Symphony when his uncle Leopold died, in 1885, and held the post with only brief respite until that orchestra merged with the New York Philharmonic in 1928. Damrosch was so impressed with Rhapsody in Blue that he immediately commissioned a concerto that he could introduce with the New York Symphony. Gershwin happily accepted the commission and then—the questionable legend goes—did a bit of study to find out just what a concerto was.

In truth, the niceties of orchestral composition were still uncharted ground for Gershwin when he came to his concerto. In his Broadway work, Gershwin had always followed the customary practice of simply writing the tunes and leaving the instrumentation to an arranger. Even the Rhapsody in Blue was not entirely his creation; the instrumentation had been carried out by Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s staff orchestrator, who worked from Gershwin’s piano score. Gershwin therefore acquired a copy of Cecil Forsyth’s Orchestration, a standard textbook at that time, and learned enough from it to write the whole orchestral score of the Concerto in F Major on his own, though no doubt with some pointers from colleagues.

Broadway obligations prevented Gershwin from diving into his concerto immediately, and he didn’t dig into serious work on it until May 1928, while he was in London updating material for the English production of his musical Tell Me More. On July 22, when he was back in New York, he started turning his sketches into a manageable score, at the head of which he inscribed the title New York Concerto. He worked on it every day during a stay at Chautauqua in August, and he appears to have let the movements flow “in order” from start to finish. Notations in the piano manuscript indicate that the first movement was written in July, the second in August and September, and the third in September. He then busied himself for another five or six weeks with the orchestration for full symphony orchestra.

By the time he completed the project the initial title had been replaced by simply Concerto in F—not F major or F minor (though the former would be accurate)—and it has been so identified ever since. Eliminating the referential title was an essential step toward the composer’s goal. Gershwin would remark later:

Many persons had thought that the Rhapsody was only a happy accident. Well, I went out, for one thing, to show them that there was plenty more where that had come from. I made up my mind to do a piece of absolute music. The Rhapsody, as its title implies, was a blues impression. The concerto would be unrelated to any program. And that is exactly how I wrote it.

Gershwin wisely organized a run-through of his concerto in November—he hired the 60-piece orchestra himself—and Damrosch wisely attended. Everybody was delighted with what they heard, but Damrosch, drawing on his years of orchestral experience, seems to have offered some well-chosen advice. As a result, Gershwin cut expanses from each of the movements (in addition to making a number of smaller changes), yielding a tighter work for the imminent premiere. The concert was completely sold out and the audience cheered rapturously at the conclusion of the Concerto in F Major.

For a succinct description of how the Concerto unfolds, we turn to Gershwin’s own description, which the New York Herald-New York Tribune printed in advance of the premiere:

The first movement employs the Charleston rhythm. It is quick and pulsating, representing the young enthusiastic spirit of American life. It begins with a rhythmic motif given out by the kettledrums, supported by other percussion instruments, and with a Charleston motif introduced by … horns, clarinets and violas. The principal theme is announced by the bassoon. Later, a second theme is introduced by the piano.

The second movement has a poetic nocturnal atmosphere which has come to be referred to as the American blues, but in a purer form than that in which they are usually treated.

The final movement reverts to the style of the first. It is an orgy of rhythms, starting violently and keeping to the same pace throughout.


IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882–1971)
Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)

Igor Stravinsky, son of an esteemed bass singer at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, received a firm grounding in composition from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he studied from 1902 until that eminence’s death in 1908. Stravinsky wrote several notable works during those student years, but his breakthrough to fame arrived when he embarked on a string of collaborations with the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes, launched in Paris in 1909, quickly became identified with the cutting edge of the European arts scene.

Stravinsky’s first Diaghilev project was modest: orchestrating a pair of Chopin pieces for the 1909 Ballets Russes production of Les sylphides. The production was a success, but some critics complained that the troupe’s choreographic and scenic novelty was not matched by its conservative musical score. Diaghilev addressed this by commissioning new ballet scores, the very first of which was Stravinsky’s L’oiseau de feu (The Firebird), premiered in 1910. Thus began a collaboration that produced some of the most irreplaceable items in the history of ballet music: Pétrouchka (1911), Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913), Le rossignol (The Nightingale, 1914), Pulcinella (1920), Mavra (1922), Reynard (1922), Les noces (The Wedding, 1923), Oedipus Rex (1927), and Apollon musagète (also known as Apollo, 1928). While Stravinsky was somewhat famous before May 29, 1913, the events of that date—the premiere of Le sacre du printemps in Paris and the ensuing riot by the audience—catapulted him, and modern music, onto a path from which there would be no turning back.

The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées had opened less than two months before on Avenue Montaigne, a street known, then as now, for its upper-crust, essentially conservative establishments. The theater was appropriately elegant (and remains so), although its decorative appointments were very up-to-date in 1913, enough so as to alarm a public accustomed to imbibing culture in neo-Renaissance surroundings. The theater’s initial bout of programming was far from scurrilous (although the mid-May premiere of Debussy’s Jeux [Games] caused anxiety through its suggestions of a ménage à trois), and when the spring season concluded with the “saison russe” of opera and ballet, Diaghilev’s productions alternated with the premiere performances of Gabriel Fauré’s opera Pénélope, on a double bill with a ballet setting of Debussy’s Nocturnes, both of which tempered their adventurous ideas with an overriding lyricism.

By May 29 the audience was ready to let loose: It had been prepared to do so by advance press reports that not only ensured a sellout house, but also primed the pumps of Parisian cultural gossip. A press release that was reprinted in several Paris newspapers on the day of the premiere tantalized through references to the “stammerings of a semi-savage humanity” and “frenetic human clusters wrenched incessantly by the most astonishing polyrhythm ever to come from the mind of a musician,” promising “a new thrill which will surely raise passionate discussions, but which will leave all true artists with an unforgettable impression.”

Cognoscenti already knew that Stravinsky’s score had perplexed the enormous orchestra in the course of its 17 rehearsals—not counting its rehearsals with the dancers. Even Diaghilev’s ballet master, Enrico Cecchetti, proclaimed,

I think the whole thing has been done by four idiots: First, M. Stravinsky, who wrote the music. Second, M. [Nicholas] Roerich, who designed the scenery and costumes. Third, M. [Vaslav] Nijinsky, who composed the dances. Fourth, M. Diaghilev, who wasted money on it.

The initial scenario for Le sacre du printemps was created jointly by Stravinsky and scenic designer Nicholas Roerich. This is how they described the ballet they envisioned:

Le sacre du printemps is a musical choreographic work. It represents pagan Russia and is unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of creative power of Spring. The piece has no plot, but the choreographic sequence is as follows:

First Part: The Adoration of the Earth
The Spring celebration. The pipers pipe and young men tell fortunes. The old woman enters. She knows the mystery of nature and how to predict the future. Young girls with painted faces come in from the river in single file. They dance the Spring dances. Games start. The Spring Korovod [a stately dance]. The people divide into two opposed groups. The holy procession of the wise old men. The oldest and wisest interrupts the Spring games, which come to a stop. The people pause trembling before the Great Action. The old men bless the earth. The Kiss of the Earth. The people dance passionately on the earth, sanctifying it and becoming one with it.

Second Part: The Great Sacrifice
At night the virgins hold mysterious games, walking in circles. One of the virgins is consecrated as the victim and is twice pointed to by fate, being caught twice in the perpetual circle of walking-in-rounds. The virgins honor her, the Chosen One, with a marital dance. They invoke the ancestors and entrust the Chosen One to the old wise men. She sacrifices herself in the presence of the old men in the Great Sacred Dance, the great sacrifice.

The balletic evening opened with Les sylphides and closed with Weber’s Le spectre de la rose and Borodin’s Dances from Prince Igor. But what everybody was really there to witness was the second item on the program and, depending on their aesthetic stances, they came ready to participate; some even had the foresight to arm themselves with whistles. Audible protests apparently accompanied the performance from the opening bars, but things stayed somewhat under control until halfway into the Introduction—which is to say, for about the first minute of the score. Then, to quote Stravinsky, the audience escalated into “demonstrations, at first isolated, [which] soon became general, provoking counter-demonstrations and very quickly developing into a terrific uproar.”

Thus was history made.

—James M. Keller

James M. Keller is the Program Annotator for the New York Philharmonic.